Vera Has a Name
by Nagia
Summary: You know she loves you because she keeps you sharp. Fifty explorations of Tenten's rather unique relationship with weapons, each exploration a sentence long.


**Vera Has A Name: a Tenten/Weapons Challenge**

#01 - Air

She often wondered what it would feel like to be the kunai rather than the weapons mistress.

#02 - Apples

The poison on the blade of her kusari gama gave the metal a fine red sheen, and she faintly reminded herself of the crone with the poisoned fruit.

(Note: a kusari gama is a 'traditional' ninja weapon; it's a scythe with a weighted chain)

#03 - Beginning

A very young Tenten peered at the kunai-- she wasn't supposed to touch it, but she rather cheerfully did all sorts of things she wasn't supposed to do.

#04 - Bugs

Tenten glared at the dark spots on her wakizashi's sheath and wiped the offending ants away.

#05 - Coffee

Tenten didn't drink coffee: early morning practice with a morningstar woke her up better.

#06 - Dark

Tenten hated to diminish the shine of her weapons, but she rubbed the thick black oil on the flats of the blades anyway, because she knew she had to.

#07 - Despair

She has only felt utter despair four times in her life: the first, when she threw all of her precious blades at Temari and _lost_, the second, when Naruto defeated the invincible Neji, the third, when Neji nearly died, and the fourth, when the blade of her katana snapped just near its hilt.

#08 - Doors

Tenten _loved_ shoji (her kunai passed easily through the rice paper) and that was the REAL reason she agreed to move in with Neji on the Hyuuga compound.

#09 - Drink

The great thing about a dented blade is that you can drink dew off it when you're in a desert.

#10 - Duty

She sometimes makes promises to weapons she can't take with her, and she always, always, _always_ keeps them.

#11 - Earth

She plants the katana in the ground, blade first, burying it deeply and turns to glare at the man who trained her.

#12 - End

Neji and Lee have moved on, knowing there is nothing they can do, but her weapons are with her to the very last.

#13 - Fall

The kusari gama's sickles rises and falls, moving steadily to its target, but Tenten isn't watching; she doesn't need to.

#14 - Fire

She hates almost all elemental attacks, ice because it makes the blades brittle, wind because it makes her miss, but fire most of all, because it melts her precious ones into scrap.

#15 - Flexible

Tenten can bend her body into positions that make Neji and Lee blush, but she never dares her true friends to do the same.

* * *

#16 - Flying 

Sex has nothing on the Soushouryuu: up in the _air_, knowing your enemy has no hope, your most cherished ones ready and willing to rip your enemy apart-- it just doesn't get any better.

#17 - Food

She is six years old, about to tear into her father's chicken dumplings, when the glint of a kitchen knife first catches her eye and she wonders, distantly, if it might be jealous.

#18 - Foot

Tenten sometimes thinks she is the only person who knows the truth about shuriken: they aren't for killing but for distracting, or, if you scatter a lot of them on the ground, tracking.

#19 - Grave

Most of her younger siblings love her weapons as much as she does-- finest form of flattery and all-- and they often, jokingly, ask her if they can have a certain weapon when she dies (invariably, she replies with complete seriousness that she will have it melted down and welded onto her memorial).

#20 - Green

Her father pointed out the faint shine on her first attempt at poisoning a shuriken and says, "See, it's the colour of the poison, so you've used too much."

#21 - Head

Neji's hands gripping her waist, she could deal with, but she couldn't deal with him just _kissing_ her for no damn reason, so she hit him across the temple with her tessen.

#22 - Hollow

With Lee's injuries and her weapons made to look useless, Neji's apparent victory over Hinata is a bitter-tasting stone in her mouth (for more than a week after the preliminaries, she has only one word for him: _bastard_).

#23 - Honor

Tenten bowed to Temari, already assessing her distance, not bothering to enter wind into her calculations because there could be no wind indoors, right?

#24 - Hope

During those gift-giving holidays, Tenten's fondest wish was always for a whetstone or, in good times, a brand new weapon to "play" with.

#25 - Light

Tenten polished the blades until they glittered; when they finally did, her smile was radiant.

#26 - Lost

The kunai would not come out of the man's ribs no matter what she did, and Tenten nearly cried (nearly, because she wasn't foolish enough to cry on a mission not involving the death of a teammate).

#27 - Metal

Almost everything important shines.

#28 - New

Neji's gift to her upon passing the chuunin exam was a brand new, painfully sharp, shiny wakizashi...

#29 - Old

...But her favourite weapon to use, when not attacking from a distance, was a nicked and worn kodachi-- it had been her mother's.

#30 - Peace

And regarding said preferred kodachi, "peace tie" was not in Tenten's vocabulary.

* * *

#31 - Poison 

"Heh, she's just a weapons specialist-- if we took away her weapons, she couldn't hurt a fly."

#34 - Regret

These people were truly idiots-- taijutsu skill was pretty much a requirement for weapons like sai, tessen, or jitte, and Tenten smirked as she unsheathed a pair of twin jitte, "And what makes you think you could disarm me, huh?"

#32 - Pretty

Tenten stared at the new no-dachi, already loving its heft and grip, and the way the light sparkled along the blade.

#33 - Rain

She glared at the nearly black clouds high above her head and pulled the sword out of her enemy's gut-- didn't want her lovely rusting.

#35 - Roses

Most boys butter up their girlfriends with flowers, but Neji knows better: he brings a new weapon to every date (expensive, yes, but he has the money and it's ultimately _very_ worth it).

#36 - Secret

"Leather," she says to her younger brother, "wrap your kunai grips in black leather-- the leather won't chafe your fingers, and you won't have to rewrap them on stealth missions."

#37 - Snakes

Her first time working with a kusari gama, she somehow managed to get the chain wrapped around her own ankle-- and promptly tripped.

#38 - Snow

The cloth she used to clean her weapons was a perfect, crisp white-- almost virginal, and had she been anybody but Tenten, she would have very much liked that irony.

#39 - Solid

The weight of the wakizashi and its saya ground her and make her feel real.

#40 - Spring

The two scrolls stood parallel on the ground, her hands moved quickly in the various seals required, her knees bent, and then she was high in the air, her chakra strings thrown, ready to destroy.

Alternate: Gai can talk all he wants about enjoying the springtime of her youth, but the truth is, she actually _likes_ devoting ninety-five percent of her time to learning to use new weapons.

#41 - Stable

She tossed the kunai in the air, catching it when it came back down again, and thought that maybe she was the sanest person on her team.

#42 - Strange

Neji arches a perfectly sculpted eyebrow at the sight of the chain whip in her hands.

#43 - Summer

The heat made her cheongsam stick to her skin, but she didn't mind: the metal of her kunai was somehow still cool against her skin, and that was all that mattered.

#44 - Taboo

The scroll on top of her desk was in a slightly different position than she'd left it, as though _somebody_ had shifted her katana; glaring, she turned to her younger brother and crossed her arms.

#45 - Ugly

Tenten wrinkles her nose in distaste; the idiot genin has allowed his shuriken to rust.

#46 - War

The battle is short but fierce, and there is no time to clean the katana Neji bought her before the next dirty little fight begins (and the saddest thing is, there's an entire chain of these, dozens and hundreds of them in a row, waiting to happen).

#47 - Water

Chakra use allows her to stand on the surface of the lake, and she loves every moment of it, most especially when Neji joins her, the bokken in his hands (this, she thinks, is training, because they are both learning something).

#48 - Welcome

"I'm home," Tenten murmured into the darkness that was her foyer, and was not at all surprised when her father's signature kunai came screaming by, _thudding_ heavily into the door.

#49 - Winter

The strong steel snapped from the cold, and Tenten's heart sank like a stone: this was going to be her bitterest winter yet.

#50 - Wood

Almost no damage made to any sort of blade is permanent-- Tenten knew damn well that a decent weapon needed to be re-forged periodically-- but the damage her brother had done to their mother's battle-axe was impressive; what, exactly, he'd used it against was a mystery, but he was complaining of numbness in his arms, and he'd somehow managed to put a long crack in the axe's haft.


End file.
